I work about 38 hours a week as a delivery driver @ one of my local Domino's Pizza places. I still get two days off (back to back) and I've begun raiding with a friend whose guild only raids once a week (Sunday evenings, which I have off due to opening Sunday mornings). It works and I still have fun.

It really just comes down to what the times are you're working and the times that you're raiding. I used to work at Lockheed Martin before I started going to college and that was 40+ hours a week. Raids started late and ended late, which killed me at work (I had to be there @6AM). If you can be to bed at a decent time, it won't really bother you. Otherwise you'll possibly start feeling like it's a second job.

I work about 38 hours a week as a delivery driver @ one of my local Domino's Pizza places. I still get two days off (back to back) and I've begun raiding with a friend whose guild only raids once a week (Sunday evenings, which I have off due to opening Sunday mornings). It works and I still have fun.

It really just comes down to what the times are you're working and the times that you're raiding. I used to work at Lockheed Martin before I started going to college and that was 40+ hours a week. Raids started late and ended late, which killed me at work (I had to be there @6AM). If you can be to bed at a decent time, it won't really bother you. Otherwise you'll possibly start feeling like it's a second job.

Don't you guys have a flying pizza box now to do your job!

due to the line of work I do, I can end up staying a work a lot longer than needed but getting home in time for raids is pretty fine.

I even have time to raid both PTR bosses and then be at work for 8am the next morning!

I'm lucky that I have a standard schedule. 9AM-4:30PM every day. Wake up around 7AM, though. My raid times are 9:30PM-12:30AM Tues-Thurs. I don't get a ton of sleep those nights, but I try to take a power nap in between raid/dinner/work.

What matters is whether you want to do it. There are people here who work 40+ hours per week and can still raid every night. They may not even have a free moment to sit down and think, "I'm doing nothing," and they'll be fine with it. But they're not you.

Then there are others who work part-time, 15 or 20 hours per week, and don't or can't commit to raiding. They're not you, either.

Personally, I had a lot of trouble last spring, where I'd have to work from 9-6:30 and then raid from 8-11. Made for VERY long days, and the idea that I had to do it the very next day depressed me. It was Weds/Thurs too, OP, so I know how you will feel (Tuesday I had off from working). But I'm not you, either; you may have no problems with it.

I'm gonna be screwed and probably benched come fall when I go back to work (teacher). September's always hectic, and my guild wants to raid something like 5-6 nights/week for the opening of SoO. Yea, I'm not making those. Good thing we've got 3 other skilled tanks.

at uni I had all the time in the world to raid, I was in a very high end guild progressing through SWP, when I finished uni and ewnt full time at McDonalds (while waiting for a real job to come along) and to begin with I stuck with my WoW time table, unfortunately this meant being given really awkward shifts, so that I could be home in time to raid, standard shifts I'd do finished at 7 or 8, and raids started at 7... So finishing at 6 meant I'd leave half way through the dinner rush. Which they put up with for a while, then they just didn't schedule me to work on raid days at all, but eventually I wasn't earning enough and was offered a managers position, but to take it I'd have to go full time, so had to stop raiding.

WoW hasn't been the same for me since.

Eventually I got myself a fiance and started Jujitsu, so between those and an evening class Even now I'm in a 8-5 office job, I don't have the free evenings to raid =(

At best I can usually manage Saturday afternoons regularly as the Mrs is at work, and all I have to do is drop her off and pick her up again, between those times I could raid...

(note she doesn't stop me raiding, but because between us we're quite busy in the evenings and us working during the day, evenings is one of the only times I actually get to see her. Future Wife > WoW!)

I raid on 2 different toons over 5 days and find it very easy to make it all work.

I raid Wed/Thurs/Fri 11:30am-3pm and do bar work at night. I enjoy this quite a bit as I am way more alert while raiding through the day then I would be at night.
We are currently 8/13h
I raid Sun/Mon 7pm-10pm which works out great since I do day work over the weekends and generally have mondays off.
We are currently 4/13h

I work in the very flexible pub/club industry and thus have a say over what days/hours im available to work. While the raiding on 2 toons only started this tier I have comfortably been raiding since vanilla while working the entire time with little issue.

It depends on your job. Working and raiding is difficult for me. Very often, one of the two suffers if you try balancing the two. If you have a job, you might have to acknowledge that raiding is hurting you.

I work in education. (7:30 am to 3:45 pm). I had to give up my 8:30 - 11:00 pm weekday night raiding guild. Very often it would make me too tired the next day though. My RL job just takes too much energy to raid alongside.

Umm.. if you don't have a relationship, you should find a weekend guild. Since I don't have that luxury, I decided to move a overpopulated realm and only raid when 1 ) I have the time and 2 ) when they're pugging. If I have the luxury, I join a guild. Then I kill the end boss once then quit. It's lame but hey, at least I experienced it.

You will likely find that the commute, while it doesn't seem like a big issue, will cause you to become exhausted - very exhausted. This, I find, is the biggest issue with maintaining a job and raiding, and I've seen the same in previous guildies.

My work schedule differs quite a bit, but my average is 8.30am till around 5.45pm. However, my work is very project oriented, so a lot of weeks over the year, I work a lot more. I then try to put this extra time on the days without raids (I do a 3 day/3 hours raid schedule). I can tell you, some days you will likely feel like you don't want to raid - that's just life.

I find the hardest time to be around new expansions and patches. When at uni or any type of school, it's easy to perhaps call it a day early and get home to get stuff done - that's not as much possible with a job, especially not with that commute time. When expansions and patches hit, you likely need to work out some sort of schedule, depending on how important your game time is to you

Depends on what you do for a living and how motivated you are to do well at work, I suppose. If you're the ambitious type, WoW's going to have to be sacrificed at some point unless you can find yourself in a nice situation where you can have your proverbial cake and eat it, too.

I personally found it very hard to continue raiding while balancing social and family time along with the desire to advance at my company, so I ended up quitting the game altogether.

School for me (just graduated high school) hasn't become a problem yet, but I forsee it will. I normally work anywhere from 6 A.M. to 12 A.M. from both jobs I work at, and I raid from 12:30 A.M. to 3:30 A.M. on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday mornings. That's just not going to work out in the long run (especially with classes beginning at 8), so I'm unfortunately trying to hop into the main raid or (I hate this option) find a different guild.

I work 4am to 530pm Fri, Sat, and Sun. I usually raid 2-3 times a week. I don't touch my computer Friday or Saturday but usually Sunday night I get some time in and then Monday and Tuesday. When I worked a M-F 9-5 type job it was really easy to get 3-4 days in a week of good raiding. Being an adult gives you lots of free time with a normal job. Once you throw a kid or two into the equation it all goes out the window though....you've been warned!

DO NOT RISK YOUR JOB TO RAID. Seriously, don't zoom out of work and neglect things that need to be done so you can get home for the raid. Don't raid so late that you're dead tired the next day and not doing well at work. I get that you like raiding... but your job has to come first. Period. I don't mean to be a buzzkill but one of the thing about being an independent adult is making good choices that go beyond immediate gratification and especially realizing that you have responsibilities that extend past yourself. WoW is a game. Your life isn't.

one thing that ultimately drove me away from raiding was that i were on a TIGHT schedule. Like, rush home, change out of working clothes, bath for 2 minutes, force dinner down my throat in about 30 seconds, leap through 3 walls and 4 different rooms to reach my computer and log on only to be 15 minutes late. It's tiring, and might take some of the joy out of raiding.

Believe me when i tell you, that a rush like this will eventually get to you, and it will make you tired of raiding or work. How burned out you'll get might not be as bad as i got.

I dont know if i got old fast or what, but i prefer to just take it chilled when i get home from work.

Having a 9-5 job my self I found 3 nights a week doable, you still have two other nights for ur own stuff. Hardest part to me is getting to sleep after a good progression night, we'd finish raiding around 11pm but my brain would still be at thousand miles per hour. Takes some self policing to log off right after raid instead of staying on and doing other stuff like dailies/alts, not always easy and I end up going to bed really late. Not idea but you just gotta suck it up the next day.